Motley Moose – Archive

I tend to avoid cross posting material from my work at the Daily Beast, but this is an important unintended consequence of Murdoch’s reaction to the Phone Hacking scandal which has sent a chilling effect through Fleet Street

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch holds up a copy of the newly launched The Sun on Sunday newspaper last February in London. (Carl Court/AFP/Getty)

Murdoch Journalists Thrown Under the Bus in Phone-Hacking Scandal

“What Rupert Murdoch has done is unprecedented in the free world,” says the veteran journalist Nick Cohen, author of a recent award-winning book about censorship, You Can’t Read This Book. “Managers have been tasked to go over every expense claim and emails for signs of wrongdoing,” he told The Daily Beast. In the process, Murdoch has “basically given up his journalists and their sources.”

Over a hundred people have been arrested since the phone hacking scandal engulfed Murdoch’s UK paper in the summer of 2011. Fifty five of them journalists. And the reason is not as simple as you would think:

During the height of the phone-hacking crisis that hit Murdoch’s London subsidiary in 2011, parent company News Corp. faced an even greater threat-an investigation in by the U.S. Department of Justice into alleged breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans payments to foreign officials. To reduce the potential hefty corporate fines and indictments of senior executives in New York, Murdoch created a beefed-up Management and Standards Committee (MSC), with access to a recovered database of more than 300 million emails from its London newspapers and a remit to cooperate with the police.

Since the phone-hacking scandal that shuttered the News of the World broke, there have been more than 100 related arrests. Fifty-five of these have been of journalists, and the majority not for suspicion of phone hacking, as in the six new arrests Wednesday, but on suspicion of corrupt payments to public officials, most of it on evidence provided by the MSC.

“Seriously,” Cohen points out, “more journalists have been arrested in Britain this year than in Iran.”

Also available in Orange

I came across this tidbit reading the news today.  Sounds pretty scary, so I will rattle your cyber cages with it.

Java 7 Update 10 and earlier contain an unspecified vulnerability that can allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

Pretty much every web browser in common use allows websites you visit to run programs written in Java.  Most of these programs provide dynamic content and such, but some are malicious.  Java contains a vulnerability called Zero Day that is apparently bad enough that Homeland Security recommends you disable Java in your web browser:

Java 7 Update 10 and earlier contain an unspecified vulnerability that can allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

By convincing a user to visit a specially crafted HTML document, a remote attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

Solution

We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem. Please consider the following workarounds:

Disable Java in web browsers

Starting with Java 7 Update 10, it is possible to disable Java content in web browsers through the Java control panel applet. Please see the Java documentation for more details.

Note: Due to what appears to potentially be a bug in the Java installer, the Java Control Panel applet may be missing on some Windows systems. In such cases, the Java Control Panel applet may be launched by finding and executing javacpl.exe manually. This file is likely to be found in C:Program FilesJavajre7bin or C:Program Files (x86)Javajre7bin.

Also note that we have encountered situations where Java will crash if it has been disabled in the web browser as described above and then subsequently re-enabled. Reinstalling Java appears to correct this situation.

I found this info through a ZDNet article.

If you’re using Firefox on windows, you can go to the Tools->Add-Ons menu.  I’ve disabled Java in the Extensions and Plug-Ins.  If you use IE, you’ll have to go to the control panel and disable it through the Java console there.

If somebody finds out that my follicles are aflame, I will delete this post and get back to laughing.

I’m gonna call out to JanF and Chris Blask, both of whom know more about this stuff than do I.